MSI Afterburner review » -::: MITRAMSI :::-

MSI Afterburner review	Category: Tutorial
Added: 19 January 2011
It is with much pleasure we can announce that today MSI has released their MSI Afterburner software, an application to overclock MSI graphics cards. And I it say with much pleasure here as Guru3D has been deep inside the development of this all new overclocking application.. Yes Afterburner is powered by our own Rivatuner engine, but this software comes with a few extra's. AfterBurner will support both ATI and NVIDIA graphics cards, Voltage regulation on the GPU, overclocking on core, shader and memory domains, GPU load levels (ATI), fan speed adjustment, device information .. and a really wicked graphical (configurable) monitor. So with combined forces MSI will bring you their new AfterBurner overclock software. AfterBurner, as in giving that airplane an extra boost of power. The end-result (we feel) is a great looking user-friendly overclocking experience, with on-the-fly advanced user options .. including something I know many of you will like, voltage control. Have a look below at the graphical user interface, after which we'll quickly run through the software and obviously we'll take a graphics card and we'll have a look how far we can take it, I think the MSI GeForce GTX 275 Lightning will do just fine .. don't you agree ? Meet AfterBurner ... Meet MSI AfterBurner Alrighty, this article is intended as introduction to the new software. We'll have a look at some screenshots, showing off some of the features and of course we'll dive into a little overclocking as well. So how do you like the layout ? Pretty nice right. You'll have all primary overclocking options available in just large field. If you look to the left you can see that the sliders have been setup in such a manner that everything has been prioritized. Voltage selection Core Clock Frequency Shader Clock frequency memory Clock frequency Fan Speed auto/fixed/programmed You'll notice that the Core and Shader frequency are linked to each other. It's always best to overclock that way. For the aficionado's and overclock entrepreneurs you can just clock that 'link' button to the left and unlock/separate these two clock frequencies. At the bottom segment you can load / save up-to five overclocking profiles. Just clock the profile number and select save. To load up a profile just clock on the profile number. It's that simple. To the right we see a nice hardware monitor displaying all primary features such as temperatures, clock frequencies, but also when used .. the GPU voltages. These graphs are configurable. We'll show you that in a minute. If you click on the 'detach' button, notice that the hardware monitor becomes a free floating window (in the Windows desktop).. If you click on settings -- you'll notice several implemented extra features. Like the overclock profiles .. if you want a certain profile activated by a hotkey combo ... you can select it here. How cool is that ? Overclocking So we startup our overclock by increasing the GPU Voltage with 150 mVolt. Notice that the second we increase the voltage, we now see GPU Voltage being monitored in the Hardware monitor to the right. We now gradually increase the Core/Shader clocks (with Furmark active) until we see the temperature hover at roughly 80 Degrees C or if Windows crashed (don't be too afraid about a system freeze or crash .. it's a part of overclocking). As you can see we clocked the card at 780 MHz on the core, 1564 MHz on the shaders. An extra 150 mV of current was needed to achieve this. At 790 MHz the NVIDIA SAFE sentinel kicks in and clocks back the card. 780 MHz however was really stable. The golden rule for a good overclock is obviously not just the cooler, but also make sure you have plenty of ventilation inside your chassis. The design of this graphics card is made so that it can clock really high with the extra power phases and such. NVIDIA however has a built in safety sentinel. If temperatures rise too much on selected domains, the SAFE sentinel kicks in and will down clock the card instantly in order to prevent it from damaging itself. Now our 0.8ns memory can be overclocked as well. We reached 1300 MHz (2600 MHz effective), at 1350 the GTX 275 Lightning edition crashed. Bare in mind that a reference clocked GeForce GTX 275 runs at 632 MHz on the core, 1404 (typically) on the shaders and 2264 MHz on the memory. So this certainly is a substantial overclock. Not bad for an overclock tool that you'll receive for free with an MSI graphics card eh? So for this test we used X58 based ASUS Rampage II Ex motherboard 6GB Corsair Dominator Memory GeForce GTX 275 MSI Lightning edition Windows 7 64-bit Forceware 190.62 What does that bring us in performance ? Well have a look, and mostly compare continuously with the reference clocked card please. Crysis WarHEAD Level Ambush Codepath DX10 Anti-Aliasing 2x MSAA In game Quality mode Gamer So the best way of looking at this chart is to continuously compare in-between a reference GTX 275 and then our overclock on the MSI GTX275 Lightning edition. Hey .. it's free extra performance, I certainly don't mind. Let's have a peek at what it does with the 3DMark Vantage score. 3DMark Vantage Now again coming from a reference card, we end up in nearly 2000 extra points in the overall performance score. Again not bad. Final words Okay you guys, this was a quick article on MSI AfterBurner, it's intended to give you a quick overview of the software. And obviously we here are Guru3D are quite proud of the application as we have been an integral part of the development. This is just the beginning with AfterBurner though, more and more cards now and in the future will be supported and likely some new features will be addressed as well. We feel MSI Afterburner is a flexible, advanced yet very user friendly overclocking tool with a lot of extra's like voltage tweaking combined in once easy to use package. AfterBurner will be fully supported and developed here on Guru3D.com as such I do like to point you guys to a new forum section here at Guru3D, the AfterBurner forums. MSI staff will be present there to answer your questions. Links: AfterBurner Website (MSI AfterBurner Support Forum Download AfterBurner
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